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The month of probation onboard is over, favorably I might add. I now have a well paying and interesting job I love until at least September. We are still in pre-season with no guests aboard and just a skeleton crew. The job list shrinks and grows like a living being but slowly we are getting through it. The last few weeks have seen me sanding and re-paiting our Tigé wakeboarding boats engine. At 1.85m I am not the smallest ”deckie” out there and getting into the boats engine bay involved some rather interesting contortions of the human body. Sanding and fairing on our other tenders is on the list at the moment too. The weather has started to smile at last, despite a dark hail storm that rolled in from the North one afternoon, leaving the deck festooned with pea sized hail. The next day the decks at morning briefing were still frozen in places yet just days later the temperature soared upwards into the early twenties as the sweat rolled down and the shorts came out.

I still really miss surfing and wave riding but here I am gaining new skills and a career I love so all is far from lost. Many will tell you that the Mediterranean is wavless, a watery desert for the wave riding inclined. This is not so. Granted it is not full of glassy point breaks, in fact here in Mallorca it is just full of jellyfish, but there are waves. You just have to adapt, being a true waterman and having the skills to enjoy the ocean whatever the conditions. This week after work I spotted what looked like a rideable wave breaking across the bay from us. It looked sketchy at best but after a month and a half here it was worth a shot. As soon as we finished out working day I felt my excitement climb as I almost sprinted down the crew corridor to my cabin to grab my wetsuit (3mm shortie and a long sleeved rashvest). It’s amazing but the feeling was the same as any pre surf session, butterflys and a knot in my stomach, as I grabbed the 6’6” thruster that I found on board and my new GoPro Hero3 camera and sprinted across the dock to jump in and take my first strokes toward the waves. It was cold, very cold, numbingly cold . Not only that, I could see dozens of jellyfish in the water around me. Such was my surf lust, my need to be in the water, that I just paddled on. The result after an hour was a half dozen stings on my lower legs which were, at least temporarily, offset by my numb feet. It tried to paddle into the small, closeout sets but it just wasn’t happening. The wave broke in ankle deep water over a jagged, boulder strewn rock bottom. Even so I spent an hour paddling up and down, trying to find a sweet spot that would alow me just one wave. I think surfers are unique like that, even when we KNOW that the are no or un-surfable waves we still try it on. Just to be in the water, to feel the power of the sea breaking over me, the stoke rose inside me and it wasn’t until I got out after running the jellyfish gauntlet again that I realised how numb my feet were.

Saturday is SUP day for us, fun paddling with friends, laughing and spalshing for a couple of hours. Check the video below: